ASUS MAXIMUS VI HERO Motherboard

Taking our first look at the board, it's very typical ROG with a strong black and red color scheme. Everything looks pretty good and you can see the normal array of buttons and switches across the board, which we'll take a closer look at in the coming images.

Moving to the expansion slots, you can see we've got three PCIe x1 slots, along with three PCIe x16 slots. With one video card in the first slot, it will run at x16. If you go down the path of CrossFire or SLI then both slots will run at x8. The final slot supports up to x4.

Heading across to the bottom you can see it's a pretty clean setup. Thanks to the way the SurpremeFX audio chip is cut off, we see that the left corner of the board is now quite empty. Moving across, though, you can see the typical headers including USB 2.0, fans and main front panel.

Turning the corner you can see we've got a total of eight SATA III ports. The six on the right side run off the Intel Z87 controller, while the two on the left run off the ASMedia ASM1061 controller. We wish that ASUS chose to color the ASMedia ones separately. Figuring out which ports are which, though, is just a quick look in the manual away.

Heading towards the top of the motherboard we can see the typical four DIMM slots present which support up to 32GB of DDR3 with speeds ranging from 1333MHz DDR to 2800MHz DDR via overclocking. Below that and slightly to the left, you can see we've got the main 24-pin ATX power connector, along with a USB 3.0 header. On the top right corner you can see the LED debug meter and the MemOK! button and a power and reset button.

Heading over to the CPU area you can see it's a pretty standard affair. Towards the top of the board you can see we've got the 8-pin CPU power connector and moving back you can see we've got a very clean setup. The heatsink quality as usual like all ROG boards is good and you can see the heat pipe between the two heatsinks.

Finishing up with the I/O, you can see we've got a combo PS/2 port, along with four USB 2.0 ports. Between these you can see our BIOS Flashback button. Moving across you can see the only video out comes in the form of a HDMI port and above that you can see we've got an optical port which goes along with our six auxiliary ports that run off the SurpremeFX High Definition codec. Along with that you can see we've got four USB 3.0 ports and gigabit networking coming off the Intel I217V chipset.

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